My Minibits is absolutely going nuts rn
No pun intended
Discussion
What’s a minibits?
#Minibits is an ecash + lightning wallet. You own ecash notes with specific amounts in your wallet that can be sent to anybody or exchanged with the mint that issued them for bitcoin.
Mint is a sort of "account-less" bank. It issues new ecash against incoming lightning network payment and give you back bitcoin against returning the ecash.
While bitcoin is held in custody and you trust the mint honoring its obligations, ecash can circulate with much privacy guarantees, as the mint can not trace actual transactions.
Ecash note is a random number and denomination digitally signed by mint that can be sent in any way, even while offline to receiver. Receiver then exchanges it for fresh one with the mint (eliminating double spend risk) and transaction is complete.
Ecash in combination with instant topups / withdrawals to Liggtning can be passed as a self-bearing token easily over the network or any other communication mean and thus seems to represent viable alternative to scale bitcoin for smaller payments.
So it's like Fediment, but with a single point of failure?
I think Fedimint goes even firther and offloads payment gateways (in Cashu it's a mint's lightning node) yet to separate entities.
You can think of it as: ultimate accountability + radical simplicity + multimint wallets = cashu ecash
vs
potentially more resilient federation + related technical and social complexity = fedimint.
I think both have some merits and it's yet unclear what will work best for what.
HUGE!
That squirrel is going to be very upset